VMware

VMware is virtual machine software that provides a virtualized set of hardware (a video adapter, a network adapter, and hard disk adapters) to the guest operating system. VMware virtual machines become highly portable between computers, because every host looks nearly identical to the guest. In practice, a system administrator can pause operations on a virtual machine guest, move or copy that guest to another physical computer, and there resume execution exactly at the point of suspension. VMware's enterprise software hypervisors for servers, VMware ESX and VMware ESXi are bare-metal embedded Hypervisors that run directly on server hardware without requiring an additional underlying operating system.

I would like to know how CBT works when we backup a VM , either using Full Backup or Incremental Backup.
for instance, in some environment the backup can be at file level ; I mean they install backup agent on the VM Machine and from the Backup software there will be just API requests sent to Vmware to get the VM prepared for Backup. ( I am not sure if the API will request a Snapshot or not, but probably it does.)

there is another type of backup: block level. there is no Backup agent installed on the remote VM. The backup software will just send an API Request to VMware and backs up the whole VM ( I am not sure if it will back up the provisioned size of the VM or just the used side of the VM)

Well, let 'say the Full backup has been done today. Does that mean the Backup has made CBT attribute turned on ? if so then let 's say I make a second full Backup what will happen to CBT attribute, will it be turned off or it stays turned on.

I would like to know how you set up SAN Switch for ESX Hosts. I believe the VLAN where the ESX hosts are on, for instance VLAN 10, should also exist on SAN switch.
How do you configure SAN switch (Cisco) for each VLAN matching the VLANs on ESX Hosts. I have heard about Zoning, then heard about the recommendation to have ESX Hosts in each VLAN map to the same VLAN on SAN switch. Now it is like I am confused which one should be done? Zoning or VLAN to VLAN mapping, or they are 2 different tasks?

I have 2 identical dell server hosts running esxi 6.5. I have Vcenter installed on one of the windows server 2016 VMs running on host A. I have the Vsphere essentials PLUS kit. I have added my datacenter and my cluster. I turned on HA on the cluster and i can see that it is monitoring the master host and will change over to another host if I pull the network cables from the master. But my VMs appear not to be migrating to the other host. I am running an iscsi NAS for shared storage and added that as a new datastore to the cluster. on the NAS i do see some small files created to show powered on host status.

where can i start to troubleshoot why the VMs are not available to the other host?

I would like to migrate two Hard Disks (main data disks) from one VM to another without down time.
What is the best way to do this.

The existing server has Windows 2012 R2 which has 1 OS Disk + 2 Hard Disks.
The Target (new) server has Windows 2012 R2 which has 1 OS Disk only; and would like to migrate the 2 Hard DIsks from the existing server.

I have 2 identical dell server hosts for licensing i have the Vsphere essentials PLUS kit with Essentials PLUS licenses for my hosts and essentials license for vcenter
I have installed the DELL specific ESXI build. spun up 4 windows 2016 servers on one of my ESXI hosts. i have installed vcenter on one of the nested windows VMs. Vcenter is running fine and i added my datacenter then a new cluster inside of vcenter. added both my hosts and VMs to the cluster. Set the cluster to use VMWare HA and when i pull netowrk cables from one host i do see that Vcenter sees that the host fails and changes the host to master.

My issues now are the errors in the configuration issues page (cluster > monitor Tab > Configuration issues ) I have added a screenshot of my errors. One is for the log files not being stored to persistant storage, one is for management network missing redundancy AND the other is for the number of shared datastores is 0 when it needs to be 2.

My big question here is the datastore numbers what do i need to add/configure so that HA will use the datastore on the hosts? to correct this? Am i missing a way to add them? I could see the error being that it has 1 (because each host has 1 datastore) but why 0? From online research it states that i need Shared network storage but I am trying to accomplish this without that need for that.

Any help on the data store issue of the other 2 errors would be greatly appreciated

I properly powered down my host but it didn't come back up. I get the error described above. I know its silly i but i didn't have a copy of the running config or a copy of the image of the USB.

I have two stumbling blocks;

when i followed the instructions described in https://goo.gl/UgMCF7 by Andrew Hancock, i got stuck at step 1. The USB couldn't be backed up 'couldn't read media message.' Not be out done by this message, I skipped to step 2 and followed it all the way to checksum.

The checksum is different between the corrupt and the one i recreated from different machine but with the same esxi install file. This is probably because i have updated the host since i last installed it.

Do i need to recreate the install from the same machine in order to have the same checksum?

What would happen if i replaced the file with a working xorg.v00, with a different checksum?

If i did a new fresh install from a different USB, will i be able to recover the Data in my datastore using the same config. I mostly care about the data thats in the datastore.

Is it possible to migrate a VM from one ESXI host to another without vCenter using the free version of vSphere?

I want to migrate a few VMs including a secondary Domain Controller to another host. I know live migrate is out, but I thought regular powered off migration would still be possible. Looks like it's not however. Can someone confirm?

What are the alternatives? I was thinking of copying the VM data-files off to an NFS NAS backed datastore and then copy them over to the new target host data store and import the vm from the VMX file to the new host? What I am concerned about is how if at all, doing this will effect the DC VM?

I would like to use VMST Tool service in order to update patches on virtual machines that are offline within the Vcenter infrastructure.
My main questions are:
Can the VMST service tool scan missing security patches in a offline VM?
Does this tool generates reports from the scans?

I have a VMware ESXi lab in my home using two physical hosts and a Synology NAS device. I've been using this for some years now without issue. I am setting up a newer lab on two ESXi "hosts" that I'm running on my Mac using VMware Fusion. I set this up the other day and created the VCA on the Synology datastore and it was working just fine. The only issue I had was speed since my Mac and the two new hosts are living in one part of my house and the Synology device is in the basement connected by a wireless network. While it ran OK, it was obviously a little slow and I decided to move the Synology box to the GB connection near my Mac. There is no routing going on here... it's all one big happy network and the wireless devices just create a mesh network to connect everything together in my house.

Before I moved the Synology box, I noticed that I was woefully behind on my updates so I applied all of the waiting updates. I didn't notice what version of DSM I was on before I started, but I'm on 6.1 now. After I did that and moved the box, I fired everything back up on the new lab and that's when the problems began. The hosts recognize the iSCSI setup and it sees the Synology device and the Synology device sees the iSCSI connections from the lab, but it no longer sees the datastore. I've tried doing everything i can think of in the ESXi environment to get the datastore back and nothing works. I even took the box back to the basement and fired up the old lab and it also fails …

In Vmware we can have so many VMs in so Many Vlans.
seeing that ESX hosts connect to the storage via Storage Switch, the question is whether the storage is also mapped to vlan of the VMs ?

for instance we have VLANS 10,20,30,40 on ESX host. The storage is presented to ESX host and assigned IP address 192.168.20.15/24. Now will only VMs on VLAN 20 be able to access the storage or other VMs on VLANs 10,30,40 also can access the storage ?

In the case of we have ESX hosts in the same cluster, I believe VMs can be vMotioned within the CLuster. Now if VMs are in different subnets, will this be a problem when they get vMotioned? if so then how to prevent that ?

When setting up a new ESXi Host in Vmware Network, what kind of wiring you are supposed to use. I mean you connect a wire to the Storage Switch and another wire to the Network switch, so does each connection need an IP address? I know the connection to the network switch needs IP address which is called the Management Interface , what about the connection to the storage switch ?
I also want to know when you set up the redundancy, for instance you connect the ESX host to 2 Network Switches ( will you need 2 IP addresses on the Host ?)
The same for the connection to Storage switch :can we connect ESX host to 2 storage switches, or we can just connect the Storage switches to the Network Switches , and this will take care of the connections of ESX host to the storage device?

I want to move a 2008 R2 DC to another host to free up resources on the one it is currently on.
Moving the VM is simple enough. Power off and migrate it over. There are other DCs in the environment so shutting it down is not a concern,

My only worry is will moving the DC to another host change anything that could cause problems with DC replication?
I've read horror stories when people try virtualizing existing DC's and was wondering if there is anything similar to worry about in this scenario.

From my Vcenter, Am basically trying to clone a template on host 1 and creating a new VM on host 2 using the created clone template , and am getting the error mentioned above.

am not sure why is this happening, but since it gave me the warning message i think it has to do with the virtual switches, if so can someone please explain me or refer me a good link that will be able to help me with switches.

VMware

VMware is virtual machine software that provides a virtualized set of hardware (a video adapter, a network adapter, and hard disk adapters) to the guest operating system. VMware virtual machines become highly portable between computers, because every host looks nearly identical to the guest. In practice, a system administrator can pause operations on a virtual machine guest, move or copy that guest to another physical computer, and there resume execution exactly at the point of suspension. VMware's enterprise software hypervisors for servers, VMware ESX and VMware ESXi are bare-metal embedded Hypervisors that run directly on server hardware without requiring an additional underlying operating system.